Tag Archives: ghosts

Today’s fortune says:

Kindness only comes in whole.

Broken Promises, Broken Lives

Mary Anne yawned. She glanced at the alarm clock beside her bed. Three a.m. No wonder she was sleepy. She plugged her cell phone into the charger and tied back her long brown hair in a ponytail. Sleeping in her blue sweats seemed like an even better idea. The wind had risen, blowing the willow branches against her bedroom window. She knew she should have taken the first floor apartment. Too many bad memories. She couldn’t step out on a balcony without thinking of Esmeralda.

Mary Anne picked up her phone again. It had been a year already. She swiped through her photos until she found the last photo taken of Esmeralda when she was still happy, standing on the rooftop of that youth hostel in Yokohama. Cherry blossom season. Esmeralda loved flowers. The hotel held a party that night on the rooftop. The breeze blew cherry blossom petals along the streets. As night fell, neon came on all over the city. So amazing.

That night Esmeralda and Mary Anne had stayed up late, talking about the future. They’d been to a temple the day before and chose fortune sticks. The numbers on the sticks matched scrolls that described the kind of luck they could expect to have in the areas of health, money, relationships, scholarship, and spiritual matters. At the party they found a fellow guest who spoke English, Japanese, Italian and French. Massimo translated the fortune scrolls. It was all just one more item on the tourist attraction list until Massimo frowned.

“Esmeralda, in every column it says you must finish what you start. Any project, any job, any course of study, you must work hard and finish it as quickly as possible.”

“Why?” Esmeralda asked.

“I don’t know quite what it means. Something along the lines of Carpe Diem, seize the day.” Massimo gave her back the scroll and rubbed his hands together in a nervous gesture. “Many cultures have such sayings.”

She wanted to laugh it off and get back to the party. It wasn’t like she and Esmeralda were Buddhists and actually went to that temple. They were college students on vacation.

After the party, Esmeralda sat up late on the rooftop, watching the endless traffic and the rainbow of neon signs. It was three a.m. Mary Anne had enough plum wine to leave her sleepy and content. Esmeralda’s voice woke her from a doze.

“You understand, don’t you, Annie? I just want to be sure Teresa is OK.”

Teresa was Esmeralda’s little sister, all of fourteen, just starting high school. So pretty, but not all that smart.

“No problem, Esme.”

“You promise? Make sure she studies hard, and stays away from the bad boys.”

“Promise.”

Now Mary Anne put her phone back on the charger. Life was so unfair. A week after they came home from Japan, Esmeralda fell down some stairs. She couldn’t use her left arm properly and had missed her grip on the handrail. Tests and more tests. Six months later Esmeralda was dead. Some horrible neurological condition that happened to only one in one million people.

The willow branches rattled against the window again. Mary Anne frowned. She couldn’t recall that much noise even during some of the winter storms. She threw back the covers and padded across the carpet to the window. She pulled open the curtains.

Esmeralda stood there, her heavy black braid a mess, her hospital gown hanging off one shoulder, her face twisted like a stroke patient. Beneath her feet, nothing but three floors of empty air.

“You broke your promise!”

“What? No!”

“Teresa is lost. You did not protect her.”

Mary Anne shook her head. Late night. Too much Internet. That blue glow from her phone messing with her brain.

“You promised me, Mary Anne. To make her study. To keep away the bad boys.”

“Teresa is fine! Her quinceanera is next month!”

The horrible thing outside the window shook its head. “No quinceanera for Teresa. No college. No future. You promised!”

“Go away!” Mary Anne grabbed at the curtains, trying to close them. The wind blew harder, rattling the panes.

Mary Anne ran back to bed and dove under the covers. A nightmare. Just a nightmare. She’d done everything she could to help Teresa study hard. Even found her a math tutor. So Teresa went to a few parties. She always went in a group with three or four other girls. School events. Church events. Adults keeping an eye on the kids.

“Manuel is good for nothing but making babies!” Esmeralda let out a tormented wail. “You kept only half of your promise!”

Mary Anne rolled out the other side of the bed. She hit the floor on hands and knees and scrambled toward the door. Up on her feet, she ran for the front door and flung it open, racing down the balcony to the stairway.

The Blair Witch Project and the first Paranormal Activity movies launched a new sub-genre of horror: found footage. Sometimes the people who find the footage know its original purpose. Sometimes the footage is simply discovered and viewing it can provide answers, deepen the mystery, drive you insane, and/or get you killed.

The problem with the success of these two movies is how often and how badly other filmmakers keep trying to imitate them.

This happens in the world of books as well. Charlaine Harris‘ Sookie Stackhouse series began appearing close to the start of the vampire craze. Their popularity and the subsequent HBO series True Blood did a lot to prompt the already growing industry of vampire-based novels. Some of these are quite good. Others are not. (cough cough Twilight cough.)

Really bad books and movies can serve as practical guides for What Not to Do. This brings me back to those found footage movies. I love a good ghost story. Now and then I go trawling through Netflix and Amazon, hoping to find a movie that doesn’t just shuffle together the same tiresome people, camera equipment, Ouija boards, and insane asylums. I have found a few gems, but it’s appalling how many mediocre wannabes clutter up the genre.

Let’s have a look at how such a movie provides a check list for What Not To Do.

PLOT — Familiar, contrived, predictable, unrealistic, and not all that scary. What is the opposite of all that? Strange, natural, unexpected, realistic, and terrifying. Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak is all that and more.

CHARACTER — Shallow, annoying, not sympathetic, and their motivations are often forced. They do really stupid things that anybody with a shred of survival instinct wouldn’t even consider. We want characters who are complex, endearing, sympathetic, and genuine. Above all, make your characters intelligent with at least some common sense.

SETTING — Not realistic. Never mind the question of whether or not ghosts actually exist. Let’s think about the fact that laws about private property, trespassing, and public health are very real and rigorously enforced. Abandoned medical facilities with a history of death, disease, torture, horrible medical experiments, and abuse of the patients by the staff were often built back when asbestos and other toxins were a regular part of the construction business. Professional paranormal investigators know about contacting property managers, getting the appropriate permits, and avoiding lawsuits.

TONE — They’re going for creepy and atmospheric, but when the filmmakers abide by the trite formula of dead cell phones, flickering lights, poltergeist antics, etc. etc., there’s no suspense. Instead, it all becomes laughable. Remember how Professor Lupin taught Harry Potter and the gang how to get the upper hand with the Boggart, the creature that would take on the appearance of a person’s worst fear? Just find a way to make it funny, and that takes all the fear out of it.

THEME — This depends on the particular variations present in a specific movie. Most of the time, it boils down to “People who refuse to listen to multiple warnings about the Haunted Madhouse deserve whatever happens to them.” That brazen band of party animal college students is so annoying I’ve ended up cheering on the monsters.

PACE — Such movies usually kick off with an info dump about the setting, the main characters, or both. This is the movie version of a Prologue, and it contains every reason why smart people don’t go near the setting even in broad daylight. Too Much Information ruins the movie because now we have a good idea about what horrible fates will befall the characters. Place your bets, because once the Ouija board is out and the candles are lit, the bodies are going to start piling up.

sliptalk.com

In the spirit of fairness, I will mention a few of those gems I’ve found:

An important part of any travel is where you’re going to stay for the night. If you aren’t fortunate enough to have friends or family in the area, then you will probably end up getting a room in an hotel. I have quite a few hotel stories.

When I was 10, 13, and 16, my father and I drove from Southern California to Toledo, OH to visit my grandmother. It took us about 3 days to get there. We stopped for the night at cheap local motels. On the inside, they all looked pretty much the same. Knotty pine walls, thrift store furniture, ugly paintings, and sagging mattresses. Until I was old enough for a driver’s license, I had to invent various games to keep myself entertained during the long hours on the road. On one particular trip I recall sitting up late in the bathroom with the door shut so the light wouldn’t keep Daddy awake. I wrote postcards to a friend of mine from my debate team days. I’d drop them in the mail at post offices along the way so the postcards arrived one after the other like those old Burma Shave signs!

At BayCon one year Pat and I didn’t make our hotel reservation in time, so we ended up at the Motel 6 down the street. The room was clean, with a bed and a shower, which is pretty much all I really need. We did discover one very strange feature. The light switch for the bathroom was on the walloutside the actual bathroom itself. Do I need to tell you what happened next? Pat and I would sneak up on each other and flip the switch at some very inconvenient moments!

My husband and I met at the Northern Renaissance Faire and even worked there together for a few years. When I became pregnant with our first son, I wasn’t working Faire anymore, but Chris and I did decide to go visit for a weekend. We booked a cheap motel near the Faire site and woke up Sunday morning to the sounds of the people in the next room having a very good time. So good they were slamming their headboard against the wall just on the other side next to our heads. I got up and took a shower. Now I was at that stage of pregnancy where your balance starts to change. The shower/bathtub unit was brand sparkling new, no mat or traction pads on the bottom, and no safety rail. My husband told me later what happened next.

There I was, in the shower, washing my long hair. I got soap in my eyes, leaned back to wash it away, and lost my balance. Our neighbors reached the Big Moment in their good time. He screamed, she screamed, and then I screamed. My husband told me there was a moment of stunned silence, a sudden thumping as of running feet, then the door to their room opened and shut. Car doors slammed, the engine revved, and they took off. I stepped out of the bathroom minutes later to find my husband still whooping with laughter.

On a side street just off of Beverly Hills boulevard, quite close to some of the big, glitzy hotels, there is a small family-run hotel that was built in the 1930s. Pat and I stayed there about 12 years ago when we were working on some screenplays for an actor who was also a world champion martial artist. One night, quite late, we heard sounds in the room above us like somebody was bowling or moving heavy furniture. In the morning we asked the manager about it. He insisted the room was unoccupied. This was an old building, under partial renovation. OK fine. The next night, after midnight, we had a plugged toilet some plumbing problems. We knew the manager and his wife were already asleep, so I went downstairs looking for a supply closet.

This was a bad idea. No, I was not in the basement. I did have to walk down a hallway I’d never seen before. The light was on, the doors were shut, and I couldn’t find what I was looking for. When I turned around to walk back, some of the doors were slightly ajar. I had that horrible feeling of being watched. And then I heard three or four little kids whispering and giggling. There were no children in the hotel. At all. I bolted upstairs like I had hellhounds chasing me. Between my panic and the resulting asthma attack it took me at least ten minutes to tell Pat what happened. She went downstairs and came back with the plunger we needed.

Today is a great day for celebrating! Here in America it’s Independence Day, celebrating 238 years of being an independent nation separate from Great Britain. Here in my corner of America, I’m celebrating the release of my second nonfiction ebook, The Fright Factory!

Many thanks to Bridget McKenna at Zone1Design.com for once again coming up with the images, fonts and excellent advice that turned my manuscript into such a sharp-looking ebook. Bridget did the design work for me on The Writer’s Spellbook. When my next project is ready to become an ebook, I’ll be going straight to Bridget with that one.

The first story I ever sold was a horror story. “Fallen Idol” appeared in After Hours, edited by William Raley. Much to my delight, the story was later accepted for The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXI, edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner.

Time now for today’s CONTEST QUESTION!

Which author is considered the greatest ghost story writer of all time?

Follow Blog via Email

Finding My Fiction

Who I Am

I'm a professional writer living in Northern California with my husband and two sons. Fantasy in various forms is my reading and writing pleasure. I'm a history buff, a Japanophile, and I love to learn about language(s). I enjoy making jewelry, using natural materials such as wood, bone, semiprecious stones, and seashells. I collect bookmarks and wind chimes.